Focus on Europe

Primeur magazine

Edition: flash - Issue:
2015-11-17

Industry news

Intersect360 published two (sponsored) reports: "HPC Application Support for GPU Computing" and "Accelerated Computing: A Tipping Point for HPC". In the latter report they write: "Over the last three years, accelerators have become firmly established in high performance computing (HPC), a significant part of the transition into another new era of HPC, the many-core era. Like previous architectural transitions, this migration is being driven by the economics of price/performance. More cores yield more computational power. This newest transition is amplified by a supply-side shift, as the breakdown of Moore's Law and Dennard scaling leaves the market no choice but to evolve". In the first report Intersect360 Research has identified the commonly used HPC applications that currently have GPU acceleration incorporated.
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AMD CTO Mark Papermaster summarizes on the AMD blog the three most important new AMD programming tools. The first innovation is the new, heterogeneous compute compiler (HCC) for C++ programming. Second is the new Linux driver and third for applications already developed in CUDA, they can now be ported into C++. The sofwtare suite is knwon by the name "Boltzmann Initiative"
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The Student Cluster Competition has started in Austin at SC15. There is a nice real time visualtisation of the power each team uses. They may not exceed a 3120 W power limit. The dashboard also provides a quick overview of the teams.
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The largest supercomputing facility in Africa has chosen Bright Cluster Manager as their infrastructure management solution. The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is a scientific research and technology development organisation in Africa, undertaking multidisciplinary research and technology innovation that contributes to the improvement of the quality of life of South Africans. The Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC) is a unit of the CSIR, and provides computational facilities to a wide range of science and engineering domains. The CHPC's mission is to offer world-class high performance computing (HPC) that enables cutting-edge research with high impact on the South African economy.
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Bright Computing will release Version 7.2 of its industry-leading Bright Cluster Manager software solutions, including Bright Cluster Manager for HPC, Bright Cluster Manager for Big Data, and Bright OpenStack in January 2016. The release announcement was made at Bright Computing's booth, #1815, at SC15. The updates will include more than a dozen features that simplify OpenStack deployment, add built-in integration functionality, and greatly improve Big Data integration, including support for the latest releases from Apache, Cloudera, and Hortonworks. Among other enhancements, the updates to Version 7.2 include improved integration with Puppet to simplify fine-grained control over individual nodes, ZFS support to provide a robust alternative to BtrFS for software image revision control, support for Intel Omni-Path, and integration with Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenStack Liberty.
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GIGABYTE Technology, a creator of high performance server hardware, is presenting at the Supercomputing 2015 show in Austin, Texas, two new models of server rackmount solutions supporting the NVMe storage interface. Based on the Intel C612 chipset, these two new models complement GIGABYTE's line of varied form factor server solutions with systems able to receive NVMe based 2.5"/3.5" devices in front-access hot-swappable bays. With significantly higher IOPS, lower latency, and lower power consumption compared to SATA III and SAS3 interfaces, the NVMe technology is designed to deliver faster data transfer performance between a storage device and the processor(s) of a system. With the two new NVMe enabled models - which are part of a larger upcoming line-up, GIGABYTE is now able to offer server solutions optimized for demanding applications requiring the extra level of storage performance provided by NVMe devices. These new products are displayed on GIGABYTE's booth no.2725 with other of the company's latest server motherboards and rackmount systems.
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Focus on Europe

Juelich Research Centre in Germany published a new issue of Exascale Newsletter with German supercomputer news. In this issue: Statement Prof. Markus Diesmann; The Limits of Simplification; Getting to Grips with Big Data; More Data Does Not Mean Deeper Knowledge; The All-Rounder; 'Prototype for Next Generation Supercomputers.
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